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The Huffington Post sale to AOL for $315 million has every content-play entrepreneur in the U.S. wondering if they can pull off the same trick. No, Arianna Huffington didn't make Forbes 400 kind of money, but she did okay, earning a reported $18 million and a big job at a big public company, which isn't a small thing. But forget the money for a second. She (and more so, the team of wicked smart advisers and professional investors and managers around her) did something else that's very, very difficult to do. They built a news business from scratch and sold it for tens of millions of dollars in just a few short years.

That's good news and bad news for all the other, would-be Arrianas out there. Good news, because it shows that it is possible. Bad news, because there are only a handful of media companies who have the wherewithal, inclination and appetite for this kind of acquisition, and Yahoo and AOL are far and away the biggest. With this deal, AOL is likely sated for a while.

That makes a post by the deeply media savvy Henry Blodget all the more interesting today. As always with Blodget, the post has a wonderful self-deprecating tone and a smattering of numbers to illustrate the inner workings of a business. But in this case, the business he's illuminating is his own, and the post glows with a flattering light, showing that the folks at The Business Insider are working hard at building a successful enterprise and headed in the right direction:

We only did only $5 million of revenue last year ($4.8 million, to be precise, of which most came from advertising). And, yes, $5 million of revenue is pretty puny in general. It's less than a single big network news anchor gets paid in a single year, for example.

But $5 million of revenue is a lot more revenue than we did three years ago ($39,495). And we're a few years younger than those other digital guys mentioned above. And we're on a similar trajectory.

Even though we're dumb enough to disclose all this stuff, we're not quite dumb enough to make a projection. But please forgive us for believing that, if we keep working hard, and we keep getting better, we can eventually get to--and beyond--where Huffpo and Gawker are today (financially). And by then, I expect, Huffpo and Gawker will have moved on to vastly more impressive things.